Going Ashore (3 page)

“Maybe he’d like that,” Emma had said, with such innocent accuracy that her mother, presented with the thought, stared at her, alarmed. “Then he could have the place all to himself.”

In November, they joined the cruise. They had come aboard wearing summer dresses, confident in the climate promised by travel posters – the beaches, the blue-painted seas, the painted-yellow suns. Their cabin was full of luggage and flowers. Everything was new – their white bags, the clothes inside them, neatly folded, smelling of shops.

“It’s a new life, Emma,” said Mrs. Ellenger.

Emma had caught some of the feeling, for at last they were doing something together, alone, with no man, no Uncle Anyone, to interfere. She felt intensely allied to her mother, then and for several days after. But then, when it became certain that the miracle, the new life, had still to emerge, the feeling disappeared. Sometimes she felt it again just before they reached land – some strange and unexplored bit of coast, where anything might happen. The new life was always there, just before them, like a note indefinitely suspended or a wave about to break. It was there, but nothing happened.

All this, Emma sensed without finding words, even in her mind, to give the idea form. When her mother, helpless and lost, asked why they had come, she could only sit on her bed, playing with her doll’s shoe, and, embarrassed by the spectacle of such open unhappiness, murmur, “I don’t know. I don’t know why we came at all.”

Answers and explanations belonged to another language, one she had still to acquire. Even now, in Tangier, longing to explain to the Munns about the summer dresses, she knew she had better not begin. She knew that there must be a simple way of putting these things in words, but when Mrs. Munn spoke of going ashore, of the importance of keeping the throat and ankles warm, it was not in Emma’s grasp to explain how it had come about that although she and her mother had shopped all summer and had brought with them much more luggage than they needed, it now developed that they had nothing to wear.

“Perhaps we shall see you in Tangier, later today,” said Mrs. Munn. “You must warn your mother about Tangier. Tell her to watch her purse.”

Emma nodded vigorously. “I’ll tell her.”

“And tell her to be careful about the food if you lunch ashore,” Mrs. Munn said, beginning to gather together her guidebooks. “No salads. No fruit. Only bottled water. Above all, no native restaurants.”

“I’ll tell her,” Emma said again.

After the Munns had departed, she sat for a moment, puzzled. Certainly they would be lunching in Tangier. For the first time, now she remembered something. The day before (or had it been the day before that?) Emma had invited Eddy, the bartender, to meet them in Tangier for lunch. She had extended the invitation with no sense of what it involved, and no real concept of place and time. North Africa was an imaginary place, half desert, half jungle. Then, this morning, she had looked through the porthole above her bed. There was Tangier, humped and yellowish, speckled with houses, under a wintry sky. It was not a jungle but a city, real. Now the two images met and blended. Tangier was a real place, and somewhere in those piled-up city blocks was Eddy, waiting to meet them for lunch.

She got up at once and hurried back to the cabin. The lounge was clearing; the launch, carrying passengers ashore across the short distance
that separated them from the harbor, had been shuttling back and forth since nine o’clock.

Emma’s mother was up, and – miracle – nearly dressed. She sat at the dressing table, pinning an artificial camellia into her hair. She did not turn around when Emma came in but frowned at herself in the glass, concentrating. Her dress was open at the back. She had been waiting for Emma to come and do it up. Emma sat down on her own bed. In honor of the excursion ashore, she was wearing gloves, a hat, and carrying a purse. Waiting, she sorted over the contents of her purse (a five-dollar bill, a St. Christopher medal, a wad of Kleenex, a comb in a plastic case), pulled on her small round hat, smoothed her gloves, sighed.

Her mother looked small and helpless, struggling with the awkward camellia. Emma never pitied her when she suffered – it was too disgraceful, too alarming – but she sometimes felt sorry for some detail of her person; now she was touched by the thin veined hands fumbling with flower and pins, and the thin shoulder blades that moved like wings. Her pity took the form of exasperation; it made her want to get up and do something crazy and rude – slam a door, say all the forbidden words she could think of. At last, Mrs. Ellenger stood up, nearly ready. But, no, something had gone wrong.

“Emma, I can’t go ashore like this,” her mother said. She sat down again. “My dress is wrong. My shoes are wrong. Look at my eyes. I look old. Look at my figure. Before I had you, my figure was wonderful. Never have a baby, Emma. Promise me.”

“O.K.,” Emma said. She seized the moment of pensive distraction – her mother had a dreamy look, which meant she was thinking of her pretty, fêted youth – and fastened her mother’s dress. “You look lovely,” Emma said rapidly. “You look just beautiful. The Munns said to tell you to dress warm, but it isn’t cold. Please, let’s go. Please, let’s hurry. All the other people have gone. Listen, we’re in
Africa.”

“That’s what so crazy,” Mrs. Ellenger said, as if at last she had discovered the source of all her grievances. “What am I doing in Africa?”

“Bring a scarf for your head,” said Emma. “Please, let’s go.”

They got the last two places in the launch. Mrs. Ellenger bent and shuddered and covered her eyes; the boat was a terrible ordeal, windy and
smelling of oil. She felt chilled and vomitous. “Oh, Emma,” she moaned.

Emma put an arm about her, reassuring. “It’s only a minute,” she said. “We’re nearly there now. Please look up. Why don’t you look? The sun’s come out.”

“I’m going to be sick,” Mrs. Ellenger said.

“No, you’re not.”

At last they were helped ashore, and stood, brushing their wrinkled skirts, on the edge of Tangier. Emma decided she had better mention Eddy right away.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we sort of ran into Eddy?” she said. “He knows all about Tangier. He’s been here before. He could take us around.”

“Run into
who?”
Mrs. Ellenger took off the scarf she had worn in the launch, shook it, folded it, and put it in her purse. Just then, a light wind sprang up from the bay. With a little moan, Mrs. Ellenger opened her bag and took out the scarf. She seemed not to know what to do with it, and finally clutched it to her throat. “I’m so cold,” she said. “Emma, I’ve never been so cold in my whole life. Can’t we get away from here? Isn’t there a taxi or something?”

Some of their fellow passengers were standing a short distance away in a sheeplike huddle, waiting for a guide from a travel bureau to come and fetch them. They were warmly dressed. They carried books, cameras, and maps. Emma suddenly thought of how funny she and her mother must look, alone and baffled, dressed for a summer excursion. Mrs. Ellenger tottered uncertainly on high white heels.

“I think if we just walk up to that big street,” Emma said, pointing. “I even see taxis. Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.” Mrs. Ellenger looked back, almost wistfully, to the cruise ship; it was, at least, familiar. “Don’t look
that
way,” said Emma. “Look where we’re going. Look at Africa.”

Obediently, Mrs. Ellenger looked at Africa. She saw hotels, an avenue, a row of stubby palms. As Emma had said, there were taxis, one of which, at their signals, rolled out of a rank and drew up before them. Emma urged her mother into the cab and got in after her.

“We might run into Eddy,” she said again.

Mrs. Ellenger saw no reason why, on this particular day, she should be forced to think about Eddy. She started to say so, but Emma was giving
the driver directions, telling him to take them to the center of town. “But what if we
did
see Eddy?” Emma asked.

“Will you stop that?” Mrs. Ellenger cried. “Will you stop that about Eddy? If we see him, we see him. I guess he’s got the same rights ashore as anyone else!”

Emma found this concession faintly reassuring. It did not presage an outright refusal to be with Eddy. She searched her mind for some sympathetic reference to him – the fact, for instance, that he had two children named Wilma and George – but, glancing sidelong at her mother, decided to say nothing more. Mrs. Ellenger had admitted Eddy’s rights, a point that could be resurrected later, in case of trouble. They were driving uphill, between houses that looked, Emma thought, neither interesting nor African. It was certainly not the Africa she had imaged the day she invited Eddy – a vista of sand dunes surrounded by jungle, full of camels, lions, trailing vines. It was hard now to remember just why she had asked him, or if, indeed, she really had. It had been morning. The setting was easy to reconstruct. She had been the only person at the bar; she was drinking an elaborate mixture of syrup and fruit concocted by Eddy. Eddy was wiping glasses. He wore a white coat, from the pocket of which emerged the corner of a colored handkerchief. The handkerchief was one of a dozen given him by a kind American lady met on a former cruise; it bore his name, embroidered in a dashing hand. Emma had been sitting, admiring the handkerchief, thinking about the hapless donor (“She found me attractive, et cetera, et cetera,” Eddy had once told her, looking resigned) when suddenly Eddy said something about Tangier, the next port, and Emma had imagined the three of them together – herself, her mother, and Eddy.

“My mother wants you to go ashore with us in Africa,” she had said, already convinced this was so.

“What do you mean, ashore?” Eddy said. “Take you around, meet you for lunch?” There was nothing unusual in the invitation, as such; Eddy was a great favorite with many of his clients. “It’s funny she never mentioned it.”

“She forgot,” Emma said. “We don’t know anyone in Africa, and my mother always likes company.”

“I know
that,”
Eddy said softly, smiling to himself. With a little shovel, he scooped almonds into glass dishes. “What I mean is your mother actually said” – and here he imitated Mrs. Ellenger, his voice going plaintive and high – “‘I’d just adore having dear Eddy as our guest for lunch.’ She actually said that?”

“Oh, Eddy!” Emma had to laugh so hard at the very idea that she doubled up over her drink. Eddy could be so witty when he wanted to be, sending clockwork spiders down the bar, serving drinks in trick glasses that unexpectedly dripped on people’s clothes! Sometimes, watching him being funny with favorite customers, she would laugh until her stomach ached.

“I’ll tell you what,” Eddy said, having weighed the invitation. “I’ll meet you
in
Tangier. I can’t go ashore with you, I mean – not in the same launch; I have to go with the crew. But I’ll meet you there.”

“Where’ll you meet us?” Emma said. “Should we pick a place?”

“Oh, I’ll find you,” Eddy said. He set his plates of almonds at spaced intervals along the bar. “Around the center of town. I know where you’ll go.” He smiled again his secret, superior smile.

They had left it at that. Had Eddy really said the center of town, Emma wondered now, or had she thought that up herself? Had the whole scene, for that matter, taken place, or had she thought that up, too? No, it was real, for, their taxi having deposited them at the Plaza de Francia, Eddy at once detached himself from the crowd on the street and came toward them.

Eddy was dapper. He wore a light suit and a square-shouldered topcoat. He closed their taxi door and smiled at Emma’s mother, who was paying the driver.

“Look,” Emma said. “Look who’s here!”

Emma’s mother moved over to a shopwindow and became absorbed in a display of nylon stockings; presented with a
fait accompli
, she withdrew from the scene – turned her back, put on a pair of sunglasses, narrowed her interest to a single stocking draped on a chrome rack. Eddy seemed unaware of tension. He carried several small parcels, his purchases. Jauntily he joined Mrs. Ellenger at the window.

“This is a good place to buy nylons,” he said. “In fact, you should stock
up on everything you need, because it’s tax free. Anything you buy here, you can sell in Spain.”

“My daughter and I have everything we require,” Mrs. Ellenger said. She walked off and then quickened her step, so that he wouldn’t appear to be walking with them.

Emma smiled at Eddy and fell back very slightly, striking a balance between the two. “What did you buy?” she said softly. “Something for Wilma and George?”

“Lots of stuff,” said Eddy. “Now, this café right here,” he called after Mrs. Ellenger, “would be a good place to sit down. Right here, in the Plaza de Francia, you can see everyone important. They all come here, the high society of two continents.”

“Of two continents,” Emma said, wishing her mother would pay more attention. She stared at all the people behind the glass café fronts – the office workers drinking coffee before hurrying back to their desks, the tourists from cruise ships like their own.

Mrs. Ellenger stopped. She extended her hand to Emma and said, “My daughter and I have a lot of sightseeing to do, Eddy. I’m sure there are things you want to do, too.” She was smiling. The surface of her sunglasses, mirrored, gave back a small, distorted public square, a tiny Eddy, and Emma, anguished, in gloves and hat.

“Oh, Eddy!” Emma cried. She wanted to say something else, to explain that her mother didn’t understand, but he vanished, just like that, and moments later she picked out his neat little figure bobbing along in the crowd going downhill, away from the Plaza. “Eddy sort of expected to stay with us,” she said.

“So I noticed,” said Mrs. Ellenger. They sat down in a café – not the one Eddy had suggested, but a similar café nearby. “One Coca-Cola,” she told the waiter, “and one brandy-and-water.” She sighed with relief, as if they had been walking for hours.

Their drinks came. Emma saw, by the clock in the middle of the square, that it was half past eleven. It was warm in the sun, as warm as May. Perhaps, after all, they had been right about the summer dresses. Forgetting Eddy, she looked around. This was Tangier, and she, Emma Ellenger, was sitting with the high society of two continents. Outside was a public
square, with low buildings, a café across the street, a clock, and, walking past in striped woollen cloaks, Arabs. The Arabs were real; if the glass of the window had not been there, she could have touched them.